MEL MITCHELL-JACKSON ON ART, HIKING, AND BUILDING TRUST

On today’s Substack Live Mel Mitchell-Jackson and I talked about internet platform burnout, leaving stable jobs to pursue creative work, social media’s failure to convert to actual sales, the importance of building trust, and why it’s so hard to make art when also trying to please the algorithms.

Mel on dashboards, and playing the numbers game:

“These stats dashboards just want you to be working harder, faster, all the time and they don’t think about your well being. And that is horrible for a creative person because then you lose your own sacred space to make your work.”

On getting views on platforms, but not much sales:

“I was promoting the program on both YouTube and TikTok. And in the promotion on TikTok, I was posting every day. Sometimes three times a day… I was spending a full time job, like 36 hours a week on TikTok in order to promote this thing. And then when I looked at my like backend website stats, I learned that none of my traffic or sales for this were brought by TikTok. I was just spinning my wheels.”

Oh, and Mel talks about a video they made about one of their paintings, and it got 500,000 views on TikTok, but didn’t lead to one sale.